BayTSP CEO flies to Singapore to support anime crackdown

A Singapore anime distributor has convinced the CEO of P2P tracking firm …

Yesterday we covered the story of an RIAA-style legal crackdown on Singapore anime downloaders. One of the strangest aspects of the story was that the anime distributor Odex claimed to have engaged US firm BayTSP to track illicit downloads but then failed to convince a Singapore judge that BayTSP had even been hired by Odex at all. Now, in an effort to clear up the matter, it appears that BayTSP's CEO Mark Ishikawa will show up in Singapore this week to help Odex make its appeal.

After coming up with a list of several thousand Singapore IP addresses that it claimed had been used to download anime content from BitTorrent, Odex went to court in an attempt to force three ISPs to turn over information about the users behind those IP addresses. The first two cases were successful, but the company ran into problems with the third case against local ISP PacNet.

The judge in that case ruled that Odex was neither the copyright owner nor the "exclusive licensee" for all but one of the anime titles mentioned in the complaint and therefore had no standing to bring the case. He also found that there was no evidence that Odex had actually hired BayTSP and so cast doubt on the evidence collected by the company.

Now, according to Singapore's Today newspaper, Mark Ishikawa of BayTSP will arrive in Singapore later this week as Odex makes its appeal. It appears that BayTSP was hired after all, and did in fact draw up the list of IP addresses that Odex used. How the company will handle the "exclusive licensee" issue isn't clear.

Singapore's not a huge place, so it's no surprise that members of our forum know people who have received letters from Odex. The whole campaign has provoked outrage in the anime community as bloggers accuse Odex of shoveling out low-quality, poorly-translated video on VCDs (only a few releases are available on DVD) then suing those who choose to download fan-subtitled copies from the Internet instead.